Its a very difficult question to answer. The true answer is that almost no companies are really privately owned in the united states. Basically only drug dealers .

what we are really dealing with here is a sliding scale between more government influence is less government influence. The federal reserve is about as far along this scale as you can travel without being considered a fully governmental agency.

I'd actually argue that drug dealers have a higher chance of being "controlled" by the government than the Fed does. Mostly because the drug dealers (usually) can't afford to buy politicians.

Pft, the drug dealers *become* the politicians (or at least their descendants do).

True - the one big objection to democracy is that people often end up choosing between ways to make the rich richer rather than to level the playing field.

The Athenians realised if you had a true democracy you would need prosperity or the average voter would bring the state and economy down. The reason people vote agenised there interests is all a result of capturing someone's imagination.

The dream that everyone can be a millionaire in the US, is one.

And in Toronto Mayor Rob Ford captured the imagination and got the average Torontonian to vote agenised there interests with these 4 words: "Stop the Gravy train"

3) If you think of the New World in Historical terms, the world that materialised out of the monarchies and dynasties of Europe and Asia, then America and Australia are classic examples of the New World. The reins of powered are very much rooted in the central banks of the world. We are living in the New World now it isn't a conspiracy, the next world order "the conspiracy theories hype" won't be calling it the new world order, it'll have a new name. We are in the New World now, and it has an Order to it that isn't working to the benefit of the people, and can't be changed through democratic processes, so no need to call it conspiracy, it is fact.

Not to feed into conspiracies but it is not (new world) order but rather new (world order). A change in the way the world is run.

The point is the same. It's not a conspiracy, it's just plain facts. The world is being run by an international oligarchy.

3) If you think of the New World in Historical terms, the world that materialised out of the monarchies and dynasties of Europe and Asia, then America and Australia are classic examples of the New World. The reins of powered are very much rooted in the central banks of the world. We are living in the New World now it isn't a conspiracy, the next world order "the conspiracy theories hype" won't be calling it the new world order, it'll have a new name. We are in the New World now, and it has an Order to it that isn't working to the benefit of the people, and can't be changed through democratic processes, so no need to call it conspiracy, it is fact.

Not to feed into conspiracies but it is not (new world) order but rather new (world order). A change in the way the world is run.

The point is the same. It's not a conspiracy, it's just plain facts. The world is being run by an international oligarchy.

3) If you think of the New World in Historical terms, the world that materialised out of the monarchies and dynasties of Europe and Asia, then America and Australia are classic examples of the New World. The reins of powered are very much rooted in the central banks of the world. We are living in the New World now it isn't a conspiracy, the next world order "the conspiracy theories hype" won't be calling it the new world order, it'll have a new name. We are in the New World now, and it has an Order to it that isn't working to the benefit of the people, and can't be changed through democratic processes, so no need to call it conspiracy, it is fact.

Not to feed into conspiracies but it is not (new world) order but rather new (world order). A change in the way the world is run.

The point is the same. It's not a conspiracy, it's just plain facts. The world is being run by an international oligarchy.

Anarchism wouldn't' make any difference. The rich and powerful will still have the men with guns.

Does anyone else want to know how far these nested boxes will go?

There are more of us than there is of them

For eons Gold Pharaohs enslaved us and our nations through their monopoly. Free us all from them forevermore with:Bitcoin, the Goldslayer! - Welcome to the digitally portable, untraceable, perfectly lawful "BTC securitized OTC Credit Swap derivative" money that is OURS, ALONE! So you got your TARP, eh? Guess what?

Anarchism wouldn't' make any difference. The rich and powerful will still have the men with guns.

And the poor, who are by definition more numerous than even the praetorian class, will also have guns. If it comes to a shooting war... well, there's a reason kings don't have a lot of power anymore.

King's had armies.

But today, the people in power have militaries with more destructive power than you could even think of.

I have often been amused by the very notion that guns alone will help people for example against their own government in the US.France, Britain, Pakistan, India, China.

In all of those countries, I must laugh in the same manner. Germany, not so much anymore. We have problems financing our military here.

YOu see, if it was all about guns, I would agree. BUt it is about fighter planes, CX gas canisters, Special Forces, helicopters, cruise missiles, drones, tanks, paralyzing gas and so on. The disparity of power is by far greater than before. 200 years ago, people could take arms and win. Today, any government has the means to massacre them all in a strike, if they wanted to.

You can for example see Syrias Assad fail horribly at that, since he does not want western forces in his country. He could have just massacred them all with his means. We will see how that turns out...

(Stephanie Flanders at @14:30 incorrectly separates capitalist and entrepreneur, otherwise I think she does a good job, there is nothing wrong with entrepreneur using capital, but there is a problem when a monopoly is mistaken for entrepreneurship. )

Ultimately Property is a human meme, and what ownership is and isn't changes with consciousness. Take slavery for example, people used to be property and then it changed over time and now most of us agree people aren't property.

And if you go back to the Khoisan or Bushman from Sothern Africa for example, just out of interest genetically when you trace the human mitochondrial DNA, they come closest to being direct descendents of the first humans.

Interestingly when the Duch settled in Southern Africa they could not make slaves of the San, as they would die in captivity, I would speculate it was because life is more than just a motive for food and warmth, but life is best understood when you are free to explore it. Bushman culture has no concept of property, they just live in the now. (If you have Netflix a movie that gives you some insight is "The Gods Must be Crazy." A comedy about the introduction of a coke bottle to a Bushman tribe.)

By contrast the Bantu people from Africa had evolved the meme of property rights they often used cows as money in large triads they also arrived in Sothern Africa around the time of the Europeans and fought each other. It is this population group that spared through Africa and were traded as slaves in Europe and North America.

While the Bushman living in a desert, where water is incredibly scares and not having adequate water is a life or death situation saw drinking water as communal property and a right. As nomads they would berry an ostrich egg shells filled with water and mark it with a stick so other nomads and tribes could use the resource. Whenever they encountered the marked stick in the ground, they would fill it up if they had water or drink from it if they didn't, never abusing the resource, in effect they had empathy for other humans traveling in the desert and used that collective empathy to maintain an inter-communal man made resource.

To get to the point, if one can create a monopoly on something, one destroys the free market, usually the free market finds an alternate and monopoly dies out. Today monopolies only exist because we create them with law, they cannot exist in a free system.

Getting to the problem of property rights which are considered individual's rights, and as a right that is not directly linked to "a man’s right to his own life" to quote Ayn Rand, it shouldn't be considered to be and individual right. Property Rights only come into existence when one has the ability through force to prevent access to a land and make it exclusively yours thus denying mans right to use that land to benefit his own life. While I would agree the act of homesteading is creating value (even another form of property), it is denying man access to that land.

We are at a time today, where the central banks (owners of the means of exchange) manipulate peoples labour and savings, effectively enslaving them, ( a problem Bitcoin can solve with quite effectively), We still won't have a free labour market while labour and entrepreneurs are subject to the monopoly of land owners.

So in conclusion I would define property as that which is created, without infringing on individual rights and can be exchanged in a free market.

So in conclusion I would define property as that which is created, without infringing on individual rights and can [be] exchanged in a free market.

That causes quite a few problems, the most obvious of which is IP.

I won't argue the definition is half baked, and I won't disagree the idea is radical, but then so was abolishing slavery. Hell even a fixed money supply will "causes quite a few problems" to our current system.

While I make a living creating IP, it is only the laws that make ideas as property possible, if the laws didn't exist I would still do what I do, only I would just employ a new business model and partners to monetise my IP (ideas).

The meme of property is as damaged as current monetary system; I was just making the point that we are moving in the right direction, fixing the medium of exchange fixes half the problem.